"A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it."

"In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it."

"Your library is your paradise."

"Whining writers are a hideous sight; we should really shut up, because we are lucky if we can cobble together a living from all of this."

"I have turned away from the thought of writing fiction in the past through what I suppose is, actually, fear. The direct, raw invitation for the reader to come in and explore my imagination is fairly scary for me so I have busied myself with so much else."

"I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person."

"Without literature, life is hell."

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

"Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path."

"Literature is an investment of genius which has dividends to all subsequent times"

"Journalism is literature in a hurry."

“Literature is my Utopia.”

“I rarely do any back story. I often get a thick bible of back story, but I can’t use it. The back story is a tool of the writer. But I can only act what’s in the scene.”

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

“And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.”

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.